It's OK to not like your parents
The wish for affectionate, loving, openly communicative relationships with one’s parents hardly ever realistically happens in families. If you are like me, you grew up seeing these relationships portrayed on TV, in movies, and online. These relationships portrayed were often white families with tender parent-child “hard conversations” that always ended up in a hug and an “I love you.” These scenes made our own relationships with parents feel utterly lacking in warmth and empathy by comparison.
Many people carry around fantasies about who their parents could become someday.
The parent who finally acknowledges and takes responsibility for the ways they hurt you.
The parent who listens to your emotional experience without making it about themselves, defending themselves, and turning the conversation into their opportunity to air their own grievances.
The parent who becomes emotionally available after going to therapy to heal their own childhood traumas.
These fantasies keep people emotionally invested in relationships that chronically disappoint them. The hope can be hard to let go of, because it feels connected to love itself.
But in reality, parents are their own people, just as you are your own person.
As adults, many of us begin realizing things about our parents that once felt impossible to admit. You may realize you don’t particularly care for your mother’s personality. She’s selfish, materialistic, and shallow. She has no life outside of her kids. She’s always brushing things under the rug to look good to others. Your father is a workaholic. He has to be right. He is the emotional age of a toddler. He has no friends. He watches too much weird stuff on Youtube.
Parents are just terribly flawed human beings. That is one of the most difficult and ordinary truths we all eventually grow up to accept.
As children, we idealize our parents and put them on a pedestal because they are bigger than us, more powerful than us, and their care is necessary for our survival. A child needs to believe their caregivers are good, safe, and capable because their entire world depends on them.
But adulthood changes the equation.
When we no longer depend on our parents for survival, we become free to see them more clearly. Not as heroes or villains, but as human beings shaped by a different generation, a different culture, a different set of experiences and limitations. Their way is no longer the only way to live. Their opinions are no longer law.
And with that realization comes something many people feel guilty admitting: you do not actually have to like your parents.
You can love them and still not enjoy being around them. You can appreciate what they provided and still feel emotionally unseen by them. You can stop taking their advice. You can limit how much time you spend with them. You can allow the relationship to be smaller, simpler, or more realistic than the fantasy you carried for years.
It’s really OK to not like them.
In fact, a lot of healing begins when we stop forcing ourselves to feel closeness that is not naturally there. When we decide not to be guilty about the lack of a bond. So much suffering comes from trying to manufacture warmth, admiration, or emotional intimacy out of obligation.
Liking your parents and having genuinely good communication, mutual care, emotional safety, and friendship with them is actually quite a blessing, a rare find, something to cherish and hold onto. But just know that it’s icing on the cake, not a requirement for your life to be worthwhile.
Relationships are not built though guilt, obligation or force. You know this is true about any other relationship that are not your parents!
There can be grief in accepting this reality. Grief that your parents may never fully understand you. Grief that conversations still leave you feeling small, defensive, or unseen. Grief that they may never become who you hoped they would be.
After the grief, comes the relief.
You can let go of the pressure to feel something you do not authentically or genuinely feel. Relief in allowing your relationship with your parents to simply be what it is.
Once the pressure is off to constantly like your parents, you may find there are actually things you do appreciate about them. Small things. Human things. A sense of humor. Their resilience. The way they show care in their particular way.
But those discoveries tend to happen naturally on their own when you let them.
I hope this frees you up some.
To let your relationship with your parents be what it actually is, instead of what you wished it should be.